My strongest identification with Whitman is with his being self published in a world unreceptive to his original vision.
A search in Google shows several current publishers of "Leaves of Grass", a Signet Classics edition, another from Collectors Library, a First and Death Bed edition from Barnes & Noble Classics Series as well as a Penguin Classics edition of the original 1855 first edition. A Bantam Classic version is also available demonstrating quite clearly the limitations of the publishing world when Walter was alive.
I would like to dedicate all my current work to Walt Whitman on the 150 year anniversary of his publishing "Leaves of Grass". His position as "father" of modern American poetry is noteworthy and pivotal in a literary environment that often contrasts academic meritocracy with egalitarian freedom. Tyranny quite often expresses itself in the privelege of the few following mechanistic conventions in political exclusivity. Self publication should be revered as a legitimate avenue for original work and I would like to salute Walt Whitman as a brilliant beacon for some future poet "Thomas Paine" of style and content.
I mentioned the homosexuality of Walt Whitman in my first posting which I deleted because I had the 150th anniversary confused with the 100th. I said of Whitman's preference that it was shared with other great poets such as Auden and Ginsberg and that while it may have influenced the content of his work to a degree,it certainly did not damage the quality of it.
Something else I would like to address is how place and setting have influenced "beat" poetry coming out of the "Tenderloin" in San Francisco. I'm afraid I don't find the character found in bus stations, homelessness, hookers or heroin shooting galleries very sexy. These are the "seedy" characters Jesus would surely have embraced, down trodden saints of misfortune, fine subject for those seeking to transform the world into a place of social consciousness and justice for all.
Hate to say it but the pages of the New Yorker are where I find the stuff of a true sexy "turn on" modelling Louis Vuitton, the latest model shiny Cadillac or Mercedes and Tyffany diamonds, now there is where I find genuine lust and passion, quite an "evil" publication actually. No wonder they flew jets into the Trade Center, sinful as hell itself.
The case of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan has me in an uproar this morning. That the Islamic clerics had legislated such intolerance into the Afghan constitution is comparable to the criminality of the Spanish Inquisition. My personal feeling about it is that sectarian exclusivity of this nature resembles an Islamic Fascism that we must continue to resist until the region can lift itself out of the Dark Middle Ages that somehow persist in this malignant primitive mentality.
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My strongest identification with Whitman is with his being self published in a world unreceptive to his original vision.
A search in Google shows several current publishers of "Leaves of Grass", a Signet Classics edition, another from Collectors Library, a First and Death Bed edition from Barnes & Noble Classics Series as well as a Penguin Classics edition of the original 1855 first edition. A Bantam Classic version is also available demonstrating quite clearly the limitations of the publishing world when Walter was alive.
I would like to dedicate all my current work to Walt Whitman
on the 150 year anniversary of his publishing "Leaves of Grass". His position as "father" of modern American poetry is noteworthy and pivotal in a literary environment that often contrasts academic meritocracy with egalitarian freedom. Tyranny quite often expresses itself in the privelege of the few following mechanistic conventions in political exclusivity. Self publication should be revered as a legitimate avenue for original work and I would like to salute Walt Whitman as a brilliant beacon for some future poet "Thomas Paine" of style and content.
Two comments for today:
I mentioned the homosexuality of Walt Whitman in my first posting which I deleted because I had the 150th anniversary confused with the 100th. I said of Whitman's preference that it was shared with other great poets such as Auden and Ginsberg and that while it may have influenced the content of his work to a degree,it certainly did not damage the quality of it.
Something else I would like to address is how place and setting have influenced "beat" poetry coming out of the "Tenderloin" in San Francisco. I'm afraid I don't find the character found in bus stations, homelessness, hookers or heroin shooting galleries very sexy. These are the "seedy" characters Jesus would surely have embraced, down trodden saints of misfortune, fine subject for those seeking to transform the world into a place of social consciousness and justice for all.
Hate to say it but the pages of the New Yorker are where I find the stuff of a true sexy "turn on" modelling Louis Vuitton, the latest model shiny Cadillac or Mercedes and Tyffany diamonds, now there is where I find genuine lust and passion, quite an "evil" publication actually. No wonder they
flew jets into the Trade Center, sinful as hell itself.
The case of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan has me in an uproar this morning. That the Islamic clerics had legislated such intolerance into the Afghan constitution is comparable to the criminality of the Spanish Inquisition. My personal feeling about it is that sectarian exclusivity of this nature resembles an Islamic Fascism that we must continue to resist until the region can lift itself out of the Dark Middle Ages that somehow persist in this malignant primitive mentality.
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